The best thing about Harvey Mudd for me was that it is small (about 700 students) yet connected to the other Claremont Colleges. I have a hard time recognizing people until I've seen them many times, so I would not have a chance to make as many friends at a large college. I made some great friends at Mudd. At the same time, I was able to take a wide range of classes at Pomona, Claremont McKenna, and Scripps. Having a women's college (Scripps) across the street helped balance the 2.5:1 gender ratio at Mudd.

I didn't realize it while I was at Mudd, but the computer science profs and classes were great. The profs at UCSD don't seem as interested in the material.

One of the reasons I decided to attend grad school was that I had such a great time in college, and assumed grad school would be similar.

Overall, I'm not enjoying graduate school. I don't have many friends here, classes aren't particularly interesting, and I don't know what I'm going to research. I enjoy thinking about the computational complexity of puzzles and games, but that doesn't mean computational complexity research is for me. I'm interested in what it takes to write secure software and design secure user interfaces, but I don't know if those are real research areas.

Music

I'm no longer listening to Claremont Shades, USC Sirens, Blackmore's Night, Sting, Sixpence, Alanis, No Doubt, Vienna Teng, or Máire Brennan continuously. Instead, I'm listening to Evanescence - Fallen (mostly Bring me to Life, Whisper, and Imaginary), Joan Baez - Play Me Backwards (especially Stones in the Road and Through Your Hands), Strunz and Farah - Americas, and James Taylor - Greatest Hits continuously. I discovered Evanescence after hearing three college a cappella groups perform versions of Bring me to Life at two concerts in one weekend.

I found out that the song from Final Fantasy 6 that I feel like I've known forever is called "Terra's theme" or "Tina's theme".

Games

I'm addicted to a puzzle game by Pāvils Jurjāns called Net. I discovered it by reading Selene's game notes, which mostly covers RPGs. I think it is NP-complete, but I haven't thought about it carefully. I haven't played much Minesweeper (NP-complete) or Marble (I don't even know if it's decidable) lately.

I've also been playing RPGs. I played Wild Arms (ok) and Chrono Cross (good) over Christmas break. I tried Vagrant Story but didn't like it. Now I'm playing Xenogears. I like it so far, but it's very easy to get lost in 3D areas such as cities and forests. I will probably play Final Fantasy 9 next.

All of the RPGs are for the Playstation, so I've been them using an emulator called epsxe along with Pete Bernert's graphics plugins, some of which are open source. Playing games using an emulator has several advantages over using a console system: I can change the game's speed on the fly, save or load at any time, and play at the same time as my brother. It also has several disadvantages: I have to tweak the emulator settings for each game to keep it from freezing, and I have to choose between pirating the games and Playstation BIOS (illegal) or buying a Playstation and the games and then downloading them anyway (ridiculous).

Anime

Cal Animage Beta has been showing one episode a week of Midori no Hibi, Bleach, Samurai Champloo, Kyou Kara Maou, Phantom Memory Kurau, and Tactics. Midori no Hibi is my favorite of these series.

Existing personal projects

Pornzilla and Thumbs have been getting a lot of hits, even though I have not put much effort into them lately. The top five search phrases that bring people to squarefree.com are "porn" (150/day), "pornzilla", "thumbs", "best porn", and "free porn". (The next two are not porn-related: "bookmarklets" (25/day) and "burning edge".) I've only been updating The Burning Edge once a week, in part because the Firefox trunk isn't very exciting right now.

I'm way behind with incorporating feedback and submissions for bookmarklets and Thumbs.

My family's house lost power for 6 hours last night during a windstorm. The power went off and came on about 6 times throughout the evening and night.

Candles rock. Not only do they last longer than flashlight batteries, but they also light rooms better than flashlights. We played card games by candlelight: Munchkin, Hoopla, and Magic. Munchkin was my gift to Drew, and Hoopla was one of Mom and Dad's gifts to Drew and me.